Dependent
by Bassair
Summary: "I'll be okay in this room. I can be happy in this room now, for the rest of my life." Octavia never gets caught at the party. She goes home and she stays home for the rest of her life. Prompted by the simple question of what would happen if she never got caught until the day they both died. (Written for prompt #78. Dependent from my 100 prompts table for the 100.)


When Octavia is fifteen, she goes to a party. She dances and she twirls, she even gets to kiss a pretty boy under the watchful eye of her brother. When midnight strikes he reaches out through the crowd, catches her hand with his, gentle as he always is, and leads her down the corridors, back towards their room. She's giggling and laughing, skipping and spinning and she's sure she'll be able to live her life in a tiny box now, able to imagine all the moon rises Bellamy describes, without ever being sad. She can doodle until she learns to draw what she sees and she can see it again and again for the rest of her life through his vivid descriptions. She can live through this single night and all the things Bellamy tells her.

She tucks herself into bed under the floor and when he closes the hatch he's smiling at her. She's smiling too, her whole body thrumming with the excitement of the evening.

"I'll be okay now, Bell," she says and he pauses, looking at her through a crack. "I'll be okay in this room. I can be happy in this room now, for the rest of my life."

And she is, she is. Mostly, she is.

* * *

Eighteen is a big number on the Ark, it's the arrival of the age where you no longer get locked up but instead get killed for your crimes. It's the age every child dreads reaching, but not Octavia. Bellamy whispers promises in her ears, of presents and excitement and of all the things he's been planning, secreting away where she can't find them to surprise her with.

He gives her a dress, something beautiful to wear when she wants to feel pretty and she wears it for him, twirling in the tiny space of their apartment and loving the way the skirt flares out around her. She asks how he got it but he shakes his head and smiles, watching her dance to music only she can hear.

Her mother kisses her hair, offers her a small cake she's gotten from somewhere (a rare delicacy, even more so for children locked under floors) with a single candle, the only candle she's ever seen. She reaches out for the fire and burns herself, curiosity overwhelming her, and Bellamy lets her because he understands: she's never seen fire, the idea of the small room catching alight and revealing her far too real a danger, and she just wants to know what it feels like.

He kisses her burn better and she smiles.

* * *

When she's twenty-six, Bellamy comes home, hands shaking and eyes filled with tears. "She was taking too many rations. They assumed for herself and they-"

She cuts him off with a hug, pulls him close and cradles the back of his head with her hand as he cries into her shoulder. She pulls him as close as she can, curls around him at night and makes a nest for him with her slender body.

"It's just us now, O," he whispers. "It's just us."

"That's okay," she breathes. "You're all I need."

* * *

When Bellamy brings a guard home (a different guard from mom and she likes this one even less) she's under the floor, commanded early on to stay there after a certain point. "I don't have a choice, O."

"A choice of what?" she says, a frown creasing her features.

"I... He has a wife," he says.

She watches through a crack in the floor, holding her breath, watches the bigger guard pin Bellamy's smaller frame to the wall, watches as skin is revealed, quicker than looks comfortable (she still guards herself in the shower, even though Bellamy's seen it all before) and she watches Bellamy do things that don't quite make sense. His eyes flick to the crack in the floor and she puts a hand over her mouth, watching his body move and it's _beautiful _and perfect, just like him.

She knows she shouldn't look, he doesn't even know she can see through the crack, but she can't tear her eyes away from how he's moving, how he's muffling his noises and how sweat is clinging to his brow. She can't stop looking at how perfect he is.

She has her first orgasm under the floor, the ears of her age old teddy bear in her mouth to muffle the sound and her eyes locked on her brother's without him even knowing.

* * *

She kisses a bruise that's just a little too far down his body and he jerks away. "Stop that," he grunts.

She looks up at him and she wants to kiss his perfect lips like the guard did. She wants to kiss other places like the guard did too. She wants to do everything the guard did but she isn't sure she has the body parts she needs for that, so she wonders if Bellamy can do it to her instead. She's naive and she's young for twenty-seven and the lines on his face are as beautiful as he is. "Why? You seemed to like it." She kisses his bottom rib.

"O." He pushes her away. "What're you doing?"

"You seemed to like it," she says again because she's not sure what she's doing, she just knows she wants to do it, to do it with him.

"What're you talking about?" He looks at her.

She glances at the floor, glances at the bed, looks back at him, pale cheeks tinting red.

"You could see that?" He wasn't really asking a question.

"I want to do it," she said. "Can we do it?"

He swallows hard. "That's not something you do with family," he says.

"What is it?" she says.

"Sex." He licks his lips. "It's sex. It's something you do with someone you love." That's what his mother had told him once, a long time ago.

"Do you love him?" she asks.

"No," he says.

"Do you love me?"

He looks at her and for a moment she's scared he'll say no. "More than life."

She leans in and she kisses him.

* * *

It's nothing like she expects and it's so much more. He doesn't do it like the guard did it, she touches him and he touches her and he mutters something about there being risks of him being inside her and she's sad but she follows his lead because he knows best. His fingers rub against her until she's muffling moans into her hand and he's watching her intently, like she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen as she comes.

She licks at him like a kitten, tentative and inexperienced, and he guides her with his voice, low in the echo-ridden room. His breathing comes in short, sharp little gasps and he screws his eyes closed like he can't look at her and feel as beautiful as she looks to him. He tells her how to use her mouth and tongue, how to twist her hand and he stops her before he comes, letting her finish him off with her hands just because she begged.

"Why'd you stop me?" she says as she lays against his side, looking up at his face.

"It's gross, O," he tells the ceiling.

"You did it with the guard," she questions.

"Yeah, and it was gross."

* * *

She begs enough times he brings her medicine. It doesn't occur to her to ask how he got it, what he had to do to get it, she just lets him inject it into her vein. "It'll last five years," he says and meets her eyes.

"You can touch me like that now?" she says.

He swallows. "In twenty-four hours, yeah."

"Okay."

* * *

It's the longest twenty-four hours of her life and she counts the minutes on the clock. She lies in their bed and she breathes slowly, trying to calm her nerves and silence her pounding heart (which surely must be too loud and someone will hear and she'll be taken away). She's been waiting for this since that day, since he'd said he couldn't. They'd talked and argued and he'd said _sister_ and she'd said _all I have_ and she'd won, time and again. She'd watched his face and known he wanted it, he just didn't think he should. She could read him like a book, better even for her lacking literacy.

When he kisses her it's fevered and desperate and she realises he was counting too. She wore her eighteenth birthday dress for him, the silky black material sliding against his hands as he pushes it up, and she loves the look in his eye as he takes in the sight of it against her skin.

He slides into her and she's complete, joined with the only one she could ever love, the only one who ever loved her, joined with her sun and her stars. Her moon rise.

"Bellamy," she whispers and he matches the sound with her own name slipping past his lips and into her neck. He barely moves and she recognises that he's struggling, that this is big for him too, so she guides his face to hers and she kisses him, soft and sweet, bringing him home to her from whatever hell he's talked himself into in his own head. He's all hers again in seconds and his fingers tighten on her hips as he starts to move. She wraps her arms around his neck, holding on tight, moving in time with him, and he takes sharp little breaths against her neck.

He comes with a choked shout of her name and she thinks it's almost a sob but she can't quite tell. She just pulls him closer, murmurs comforts and lets him relax into her and onto her, bringing him home.

* * *

He brings a girl home when she's almost thirty. A woman, but it's all _girls and boys_ to Octavia still. He introduces her to Octavia and smiles from ear to ear. She's confused until he takes her aside and says he trusts her, says he's found someone he can let in.

Her heart sinks but soars. She's happy for him and she's heartbroken for herself.

They sit and they talk, they talk for hours and it's _good_. She can see why he likes her (loves her, maybe), she can tell why he trusts her. The girl murmurs something about wanting to marry him and _maybe we can be a family_ and Octavia wonders if she can still have sex with him if they're a family. He kisses still, holds her in the night and presses his body to hers. He said once it was something married people did and she wonders if the girl knows they do it too, but she fights not to blurt it, not to tell on him. This is important for him, he needs this. She's seen the loneliness in his eyes when he gets home at night. She doesn't want him to have to live the way she lives.

She lies awake for hours, she shies her body away from his. She watches the wall as he sleeps.

"What is it?" he says after a week of this, a week of her slowly growing less responsive to his love.

She shakes her head. "Nothing, Bell."

He sits by her on their bed. "O."

She doesn't want to take this away from him but he's going to keep asking. He wants to know and she clearly can't hide how she feels. "I like her," she says and smiles at him. "She's wonderful and she makes you happy. She just makes me sad. She makes my stomach twist up. I don't think you should be touching me the way you touch me now you're with her."

He watches her. "I didn't want you to not have that anymore. I know how much you like it."

She knows he doesn't understand then, she knows it. He's not feeling the things she's feeling, he thinks she likes the tingles and the shudders not the thud-thud-thud in her chest when he kisses her. She thinks she likes the physicality not the emotionality. She likes both, but it's him she likes the most. She looks across at him. "It's not that I like the most, Bell."

He doesn't look away. "You think you're in love with me."

She wants to laugh, wants to run away and hide but she can't, there's nowhere but under the floor and it's up to him to cover it. She wants to cry. "What? Think?"

"You only feel this way because I'm the only option," he says, swallowing.

Her stomach lurches and she understands with perfect clarity that it's not her it's _him_, it's not him doubting her feelings it's him doubting _himself_. How can she possibly love someone like him? He doesn't deserve it in his own eyes.

She turns towards him, puts her hands on his cheeks and meets his eyes. "I love you, Bellamy," she says and he doesn't look away. "I love your fire and your passion, I love the way you touch me and the way you protect me, but you know what else I love? Your laugh. I love the way you laugh at night when you don't think I hear you. I love the way you wrinkle your nose if I put too much seasoning in our food and I love the way you kiss my bruise when I trip over and hit the table. I love your gentle touch, the gentlest touch I'd ever know even if I was out there with all those people. I don't want the boy I kissed at the dance I want you. I'd always want you. I will always want you. But more than that I want you to be happy and if she's what you need to be happy then I want you to be with her." She closes her eyes and looks away. "I want you to be happy."

He turns her face back, kisses her with his eyes open and she looks into his soul and sees he feels the same. She closes her eyes and fists her hands in the front of his shirt, dragging him closer and breathing into the kiss like it's life itself.

* * *

Bellamy leaves to go see the woman at the normal time he always goes to meet her and she thinks she masks her disappointment, but he comes back, presses a kiss to her lips and then her forehead, whispers a gentle _I love you _into the room as he leaves.

When he comes back with shaking hands she doesn't question it. She sits with him on the floor of the shower long after it's stopped running, she strokes his hair and she holds his hands so he doesn't dig his nails into his own skin until it bleeds. She knows what he did, she just doesn't know why.

"You're wrong, O," he breathes into the silence. "My touch isn't gentle. I'm a monster."

She swallows and looks at him. "You're not a monster," she says. "But if you are, you're my monster."

He meets her eyes, then spends the rest of the evening crying into her lap.

She reads into the Ark bulletin the next day that the woman was found floating. She shuts it off without a second look.

* * *

He's never quite the same after that.

He twitches in his sleep in her arms, always in her arms, and he snuffles sometimes when he thinks she isn't looking. She asks him, just once, if he loved her and he shrugs.

"Yeah," he says. "Not like I love you though." She stays quiet and he looks away from her, preparing food. "She didn't love me."

"How can you be so sure?" she asks, her small hand running lines up and down his back.

"She was going to tell a guard you exist," he says and she's glad she's dead, like she's never been glad for anything before in her life. She deserved to die, not for threatening Octavia but for Bellamy.

He'd put his heart in her hands and she'd tried to flush it.

Octavia tucks Bellamy's heart closer, defending its battered form with her very soul.

* * *

"Do you still do this with other people?" she asks one night as they come down.

"Yeah." She doesn't feel as sick as she thinks she should. It's different, she supposes.

"Why?"

"For you." She feels a little sicker.

"Why?"

He sighs into the quiet hum of their room and plays his fingers through her hair. "If you do favours you get favours," he says. "Sex is a favour sometimes. They give me extra rations, clothes or medicine when you need it. They tell me when the next inspection is going to be so I can hide you and your things. I do it for you. It's for the greater good."

She kisses his cheek. "Thank you," she murmurs. "I hope it's not too horrible."

He seems miles away and she watches him quietly in the twilight darkness. "It's not too horrible," he says after a moment and looks at her. "Nothing I do for you could ever be too horrible."

She smiles and tucks her face into his neck to sleep.

* * *

She thinks about it sometimes, faceless men and women with their hands all over Bellamy. It's not like the first time, lacking understanding locked beneath a floor watching him move, it's different. It's not quite sickening but she still wants to shove them away and tell them he's hers, just because he doesn't like it.

Not too horrible.

She stands against the door, looking at the threshold she once stepped across so long ago (twenty years now, twenty long years) and wishes she could go out, but it's not for herself anymore.

She fantasises about what they'd do if she could just step over the line. She'd walk with him down the halls to get rations and she'd offer out her own ration card to get her own slice of food. She'd go to the infirmary for her own medication when she needed it. He'd never have to kiss any lips but hers ever again and he'd be happy, she knew he would be, even if he chose to still do it for a little extra he'd have the choice. She wanted choice for both of them. She'd get a job, a seamstress, maybe, like their mother, and she'd sew intricate details into clothes and she'd get extra rations for them both like he did now.

He opens the door and she darts to the side, plasters herself to the wall with her dark hair falling over her face. He looks around at her, silently questioning as the door closes.

"I was just imagining," she breathes.

"Don't do it so close to the door," he begs.

* * *

It's not their first scare, but the one when she's fifty-two is the worst. They're not complacent but they've never been caught so they're not as worried as they once were. They lose track of time and suddenly the beeping of the door being opened can be heard and she's not in the floor.

She's halfway down when her back twinges, tears springing into her eyes and agony raking its way down her body.

"O," he whispers and he shoves her, almost violent in the rough action. Her face hits the metal and she goes deathly silent against the grate. He slams the panel closed just as the door opens and he leans against the table.

When he lifts the hatch ten minutes later, he sweeps her into his arms. Her forehead is bleeding a red river down her face and he allows the tiniest choked sob to escape as he moves her hair. "O? O, please..."

She flutters her eyes open, willpower and love overriding the pounding in her head and the blur in her eyes. "Saved me," she mumbled. "Thank you."

If his back hurts from holding her up he doesn't show it. "I hurt you," he whispers.

She smiles, sleepy and barely conscious, concussed. "For the greater good," she promises and closes her eyes again.

* * *

She runs her fingers through his hair, tracing the grey that runs through the black. He keeps his hair short, shorter than she'd like, but she can still see the markers of his increasing age. "Bell?" she murmurs.

He stirs from a light slumber and opens his eyes a little to look at her. "Yeah?"

She meets his eyes and kisses his lips. "I love you."

He pulls her close. "What brought that on?" he asks into her hair.

She shuts her eyes tight. "Nothing that matters for now."

* * *

She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and she wonders if he still sees her the same way. She's wrinkled and her hair is grey. Her face sags and her hands shake a little as she lifts them to her face to tuck her hair behind her ear.

She sits on the floor in their room as he gets changed for work and she wonders if she'll be able to stand back up because her legs don't always work anymore. "Hey, can you bring me something new?"

He swallows. "I can't find anything new," he says.

She tilts her head. "No more books?"

He licks his lips and rests against the bed to ease an ache she can't quite locate with her eyes. "Seventy years is a long time, O." He looks at her. "There aren't that many books on the Ark."

She glances at the last book she finished, the singular library book they're allowed to take home, then sets her gaze back to him. "Bring me your favourite then. I want to keep that one."

"What about your favourite?" he says, pulling his jacket on.

She smiles at him. "They're the same, Bell."

* * *

"Tell me about your favourite moon rise," she says one night. He's lying in his bed and his breathing is coming out ragged, like it's been doing for months.

"That's a new one," he murmurs and looks across at her, a little smile on his face.

She smiles back at him. "I had to keep a couple aside so we never get bored."

"I'd never get bored of you," he says. He doesn't look away from her. "I was young. I didn't stand right by the window but a few paces away at the end of the corridor. It was the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen or ever would see, but I wasn't looking at the moon." She held her breath. "I was looking at this girl I knew." His smile turned wry, just a little. "I was thinking how happy she looked, and how beautiful she was in the light of the moon and how much I loved her."

She lies down next to him, rests her head against his. "I didn't know you still remembered that."

He kisses her hair, takes another ragged breath. "Of course I still remember that, O," he murmurs. "I'll remember it until the day I die."

She closes her eyes, rests a hand on his stomach. "I love you."

"I love you too," he says softly.

"Do you remember the party?" she asks after a moment. "I still remember the party. Do they still have parties like that?" He doesn't reply and she lifts her head to look at him. "Bell?" His breathing has quietened, it's no longer ragged. She can barely hear it at all. "Bellamy."

She sits up further and looks at him. He's staring at the ceiling, unblinking, and she doesn't understand. She shakes his chest, bats at his face like a kitten not an elderly woman. Her own voice rasps as she repeats his name. "Bellamy._Bellamy_. No, please." She rests ear over his heart but she can't hear a sound. The comfort she's always sought is gone, just a hollow, empty shell.

"Bellamy, please!" She kisses his lips, she shakes him some more, she pulls at his hands to try and wake him. She pounds on his ribcage because she's heard that helps, she's heard it has a chance of bringing back someone who's gone away.

"Please don't leave me, please!" she screams, muffled into his chest. "Please. Please..."

* * *

She looks at the door and tilts her head. They have food but the water ran out. The plumbing hasn't worked to their room in a few decades and they couldn't have someone fix it in case she got caught. She has one bottle and now it's empty.

Bellamy stares at the ceiling from his bed and she doesn't look at him. She reaches for the door. She draws away.

She looks back at Bellamy. She looks at the door.

She can't do it.

She's never opened the door, she's only crossed the gap once and she was so young then. Her back didn't hurt and her legs didn't ache simply from the exertion of living. She's old and she's tired and it doesn't hold the appeal it once did. Nothing does as long as he doesn't breathe.

He smells, just a little. Enough.

She touches the door, like she's never in her life dared to do, her fingertips brushing the cold metal, and she draws away like she's been stung.

She climbs back onto the bed, crawls on top of her home and lies down flat against him, her head on his chest and her eyes closed.

And there she stays.

* * *

"Shit," a guard says.

"This room is only registered to one: Bellamy Blake," another says. He taps at a tablet. "Who's the lady?"

"I dunno." The first guard scans the two on the bed, both lifeless and cold and just a little decayed. It's inspection day. He stares. "She hasn't got a chip."

The second guard moves across, eyes the two of them. "Wife? What?"

"Dunno," the guard says again. He looks around the room. "Looks like it?" He taps at the tablet some more. "He kept her hidden her whole life. That's a record."

"That is it." The second guard looks at them for a long moment, then gently closes both sets of eyes. "Let's get them to the airlock."

* * *

The guards set them down inside, side-by-side, a few feet between them, and the first guard steps out. "Are you coming or what?"

The second guard looks at them for a moment, separated by death and soon the coldness of space, then shrugs, crouching down. He pulls a short length of string from his pocket and he ties their hands together.

"Freaking romantic," the first guard says as the second guard walks out.

He shrugs again and looks at him. "You doing it or not?"

The guard nods, presses the button and vents the air lock. "Want dinner?"

"Nah," the second guard says and shrugs. "I'm gonna get an early night."

"All right," the first says, ticking off his list. "See ya."

"See ya." The second guard glances out the window, then turns and walks home to his sister.

Bellamy and Octavia float together in the blackness of space, tied together by a single piece of red string, as the moon rises over Earth.


End file.
